The Madness (4 A.T.)
This article is about The Madness in 4 A.T. (2017 C.E.) For other Madnessen, see The Madness The Madness is an annual event where the moderators of the xkcd fora are given free reign to act unpredictably. On past occasions, this event has featured widespread use of wordfilters to meddle with overall communication and cause chaos. In 2017, the usual warning announcement of incoming Madness was foregone. Instead, on 1 April (Riverdix 8 Innocence, 4 A.T.), moderator gmalivuk created a general announcement thread titled "POST HERE AND GET BANNED," saying that, as to the traditional Madness, "this year none of the mods are really into it." Only a limited number of new filters have been introduced so far. Pre-Existing Filters These filters existed prior to the Madness: '' New Filters in 4 A.T. ''Filters that were in effect for this year's Madness: Other Madness Effects ''"Post Here And Get Banned" This self-explanatory thread was posted in the global Announcements section on 2017-04-01, becoming visible to every individual forum in the xkcd system. In the first reply, the OTTer GnomeAnne sacrificed the alt account "Mobteeseboose" to see what would happen. (The original MobTeeseboose user, likely a bot of some kind, was often seen in the Browsing Users list while "Time" was running and earned several mentions in the thread.) The "post here and get banned" thread remained true to its description. Mobteeseboose was subsequently banned, though only for one wip, until 2017-04-09. As seen in the first screenshot, originally the thread creator was listed as the moderator gmalivuk. After a few days this was modified to look as though the account "anfurny" was the one to start the topic. That account, a moderator sockpuppet, is infamous on the OTT for being the one to lock the thread during the 2014 Madness. "Forum Deletion" Also a global announcement, this thread was added by a sockpuppet called "daṿean" (not to be confused with the actual site admin davean) on 2017-04-04. It deliberately mirrored the already existing announcement thread which actual-davean had created the year before, "Forum Migration." The full text of the new parody read: I just deleted the forum database from the new hardware. DNS will take a few hours to settle. Please let me know if the forum hasn't completely been erased within a few hours. '' On 2017-04-07 the title of this thread was abruptly changed to "POST HERE AND GET BANNED" and the topic was locked. The text of the announcement was changed to Everyone who posted in here will be permabanned within 24 hours. Eight different users had replied before the topic locked, but they were never actually banned. By 2017-04-10 the thread had disappeared. ''Wild Card Filters'' Use of the wild card character (*) in a filter will change every word in the forum to that filter. Generally these only last a minute or two and are soon removed since they make the fora impossible to understand. Of note for OTTers are the time this happened during the original OTC with a HODOR filter (see The Madness, 0 A.T. ), and the many occasions throughout 2015's Madness where the wild card filters were used to simulate messages travelling via clacks in honor of Terry Pratchett (see The Madness, 2 A.T. ).